I have looked in vain among the many fine R24 tutorials for how to use the percussion pads on the R24 in real time.

If I am reading the manual correctly - and I am not at all confident I am - if I want to use the touch pads in real time, I must:

- clear one of the banks of channels, leaving a stereo pair empty on another bank for an eventual bounce of the percussion sequence
- play along with the tune, selecting the bank with empty channels (putting them in record mode?) Finish the song.
- hit the Sequencer soft key, select a target stereo pair to bounce the percussion to
- mute everything but the percussion, hit record and bounce the percussive sequence to the stereo pair, and voila, I have a self-generated percussion set of tracks. Don't I? Or do I?

I am sure I am wrong about some of the above. Either link to a good tutorial or friendly corrections will be appreciated. I know this is not the most popular way to add percussion, but it was one motivation for my purchase of the unit. Thanks for any help.

you create/record rhythm patterns (page 68-69) -- note that patterns are not meant to be the entire song, but sections that repeat, and a song may have multiple patterns (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro)

after creating patterns, you assign them to tracks for use by the track sequencer in place of audio loops, and create a sequence (previous section)

I'm afraid the manual is a bit vague on how one bounces the track sequencer data. One thing is that you should be able to bounce to "new files" on the destination tracks even if they currently hold loops/rhythm patterns -- no need to reserve empties. After the bounce, you would disable the track sequencer (and optionally free up the tracks holding loops/rhythms), setting the bounce for playback.